Faculty
Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and Julia & Rodrigo, winner of the 2012 Gival Press Novel Award. His latest book, The Rink Girl: Stories, won the 2018 Prize Americana (Hollywood Books). He wrote the script for the award-winning Peace Corps film How Far Are You Willing to Go to Make a Difference? Brazaitis’ writing has been featured on the Diane Rehm Show and the Leonard Lopate Show as well as on public radio in Cleveland, Iowa City, New York City, and Pittsburgh. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University.
https://english.wvu.edu/research/west-virginia-writers-workshop/faculty
Ashley Blooms (they/she) is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Where I Can’t Follow and Every Bone a Prayer. Their work has been nominated for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, Weatherford Award, and Judy Gaines Young Book Award, and they have been named a South Arts State Literary Fellow for Kentucky. NPR said of Every Bone a Prayer, “If Southern Gothic masters Carson McCullers and William Faulkner were to sit down with standard bearers of fantastic literature like Rachel Hartman, Jeff Vandermeer, and Frances Hardinge, and co-write a book, they might come close to this, but only just.”
Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, The Oxford American, Reactor, and elsewhere. They received their MFA as a John and Renee Grisham Fellow at the University of Mississippi and have been awarded residencies and scholarships from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Clarion Writer’s Workshop, Appalachian Writer’s Workshop, and others.
She currently lives in Kentucky with their partner and pets where she is at work on two new projects.
Priest is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, the Imprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, Boston Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated.
Priest received her bachelor's in Print Journalism from the University of Kentucky, her MFA in Poetry with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina, and her doctorate from the University of Houston where she was an Imprint MD Anderson Foundation fellow.
Joy has facilitated poetry workshops with incarcerated juvenile and adult women, and she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of African American / African Diaspora Poetry in the University of Pittsburgh's MFA Writing Program, and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice (CCPP) at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP).